A journey through Entebbe Botanical Gardens’ 120 years

The Botanical Gardens in Entebbe at the shores of Lake Vitoria this year celebrates 120 years of existence. The gardens were officially opened in October 1898.
The ceremony was presided over by then commissioner and consul general for the British Protectorate of Uganda, Ernest James Berkeley, who in December 1899 was succeeded by Sir Harry Johnson.

Uganda’s first agricultural research Centre
Long before agricultural research institutes such as Makerere and Kawanda, among others, were established, Botanical Gardens in Entebbe was in place to help in research. The facility was solely established for the examination and development of agricultural resources in Uganda.
When the first tea seeds were imported from India to Uganda in 1923, for instance, they were planted in a nursery bed at the Botanical Gardens.

From the nursery bed, the seedlings were transplanted to a tea farm at Nakigalala near Kajjansi Trading Centre on the Kampala-Entebbe Road. At the farm was also a tea factory.
From that factory, Uganda exported its first tea consignment to Europe in early 1929. From the records available, the tea exported to England weighed more than half a tonne.

How botanical gardens were established
When the British colonialists realised that Uganda was a naturally fertile country, they sought to invest in commercial agriculture.

But to do that, they needed to first carry out tests on seeds and/ or plants. And so a botanical garden was established at Entebbe which was at the time the capital of the colonial administration.
In early 1898, the British government sent Alexander Whyte, an agriculturist, to Uganda to study the soil type and texture in the country as well as crops that could be commercially grown in the protectorate.
When Whyte arrived, he pitched camp in Entebbe. After carrying out soil experiments conducted at the Botanical Gardens, he wrote a letter that was dispatched to England.

“Generally speaking, this soil is a reddish loam on a sub-soil of rich red or chocolate clay, sometimes of a great depth… the country is wonderfully free from surface stones and boulders… the question generally put is ‘what will not grow and flourish in Uganda?’ The furze and the broom grow so well that we are making hedges of them. Tomatoes grow quite wild. One plant was left by the boys when weeding the compound.

It flourished so amazingly that I determined to keep tally of the fruits picked from it. The yield in two months has been 3,000! It still grows on bearing clusters of lovely fruits and covers as a space of twenty feet square,” part of Whyte’s letter read.
Former British High Commissioner to Uganda Harry Johnston arrived in Uganda in December 1899 and in 1902 published a book titled Uganda Protectorate Volume 1. On page 290, under the ‘commercial prospects’ chapter, he mentions the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe.

“I give you here a photograph of a sun flower in the Botanical Gardens at Entebbe which grew up in a few weeks and produced more than 200 blossoms, all of them yielding seeds full of excellent oil,” he wrote.
“Mr Whyte considers many portions of the protectorate admirably adapted for the cultivation of tea and cacao. The last named plant thriving through the effort of Sir W. Thiselton Dyer and Mr Whyte been successfully introduced into the protectorate.”
Harry also acknowledged that cotton grows wild in Uganda but, like tobacco, “might possibly not be worth exportation”.
Harry Johnston is remembered by many Ugandans for signing the famous March 10, 1900, Uganda Agreement with Buganda’s infant king Daudi Chwa II on behalf of the Queen of England.

In 1913, H.R. Willis, another British administrator who served as Chief Secretary to the Uganda government, in a 220-page book titled Hand book of Uganda mentions of tapping of gum from a rubber tree earlier planted at the Botanical Gardens.
“Tapping results on the oldest trees in the country in the Botanical Gardens, Entebbe, and on the Kivuvu Estate have proved fairly satisfactory,” Willis writes.

About the importation of cotton seeds for experiment at the Botanical Gardens, Wills writes that they included Affifi, Abassi, Yonnovicth and Ashmoun, all Egyptian varieties. Of these, Abassi gave the most satisfactory results.
Other seeds were tried, including Sea Island, Caravonica, Peruvian and American Upland which later included a large consignment of Black Rattler.

Black Rattler proved absolutely unsuitable to the conditions prevailing and resulted in a serious setback to the industry.
Willis further writes that on the extensive experiments conducted, specifically on cotton that “it was decided to restrict experiment work to the long-stapled upland cottons, and several of the better known and well established ones were tried with the result that Allen and sunflower were selected as best suited to form the basis of Uganda cotton”.

Botanical gardens today
Over the 120 years, Botanical Gardens has evolved from an agricultural research facility to a tourist centre. Visitors are required to pay a fee to access the place that hosts a collection of species of plants and animals.
The gardens are a popular attraction for visitors both local and international, with tens of thousands of guests passing through the gates since the rehabilitation in 1998. Botanical Gardens is home to hundreds of bird species and monkeys.

Caretaker
Just like any other establishment in the country, Entebbe Botanic Gardens bore the impact of Uganda’s political turmoil and suffered neglect during those episodes until in 1995 when the Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries took it over and placed it under the National Agricultural Research Organisation. This led to the establishment of a Centre for Plant Genetic Resources Programme under the Forestry Resources Research Institute in 1999 to store seeds and provide information about plants in the botanical gardens.